The Trump administration wants to bring back firing squads
The acting attorney general considers that execution methods should be expanded to federal prisons
WashingtonThe United States Department of Justice considers that the country should reinstate firing squads as execution methods for the most serious federal crimes, along with other practices such as gas asphyxiation. This is what emerges from the report published this Friday by the ministry, which points out the current difficulties in obtaining the necessary drugs for lethal injections.
According to the document, published by interim Attorney General Todd Blanche, the decision is part of President Donald Trump's promise to restore capital punishment during his second term. In the first term, which ended in 2021, the death penalty was reinstated after a 20-year pause. In the final months of Trump's term, 13 federal inmates were executed by lethal injection.
In the official document, the Department of Justice thus proposes "the re-adoption of the use of lethal injection applied during the first term of the Trump administration" and "to expand the protocol to include additional methods of execution, such as firing squads and the simplification of internal processes to expedite the death penalty in criminal cases".
A method that is already used
The United States prison system is decentralized, so beyond federal prisons there are state prisons. Currently, there are 27 states where capital punishment exists and of these, at least five have already adopted firing squads as a method. The most recent is Idaho, which approved it in the state Congress in March 2025 and, in principle, should come into effect from July 1 of this year. However, that a state has accepted a method of execution as legal does not mean that it applies it in practice. This is what happens with the death penalty in states like California, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, where even though the inmate is sentenced to capital punishment, the governor ends up putting them on hold with a moratorium.
The nature of the crime is what determines whether an inmate ends up in a state or federal prison. The vast majority of the prison population (about 90%) is in state prisons, where those guilty of committing homicides, robberies, assaults, or local trafficking offenses are incarcerated. To end up in a federal prison, one must commit a federal crime, such as large-scale drug trafficking (interstate), tax evasion, espionage, attacks on federal officials, or crimes committed on federal property.
